"Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days."
György Konrád - Hungarian novelist, essayist and dissident.
thepamphleteeruk@gmail.com

Thursday, November 22, 2007

On things you absolutely don't want to happen two days before an election

Australia goes to the ballot box in two days' time with the Labour Party ahead in the polls and its leader, Kevin Rudd, expected to become the next prime minister. So, things weren't looking too good for John Howard's Liberal Party before today's revelation that some campaigners in the marginal constituency of Lyndsay had sought to undermine their opponents with the dirtiest of dirty tricks campaigns.

Gary Clark and Greg Chijoff had leaflets printed bearing the name of a fictional organisation called the 'Islamic Australia Federation'. The leaflets claimed that the Labour Party supported those who carried out the 2002 Bali bombings. As though to underline the incomprehensible stupidity of the authors, the leaflets ended with the Arabic expression of faith "Allah Akbar" - only the two men were not so devious as to ensure basic attention to detail, spelling the now widely known phrase "Ala Akba".

Jackie Kelly, the outgoing MP in the constituency and wife of Gary Clark, described the leaflets as a 'prank' at once demonstrating a singularly tenuous grasp on the notion of humour and dismissing any possibility that the voters of Lyndsay were unfortunate to be losing her.